The mother drone produces the tactical plan and gives the plan to every drone in the swarm. It doesn’t need to have los to execute it although there would be a lack of flexibility during the attack.
The tactical plan would consist of things like waypoints, references images for positioning, and targets. Each drone for that hypothetical “70 vs 3 tanks” engagement has a track to follow, a period of exploiting the terrain, a maximum speed final approach, a specific place on a specific tank to target etc.
The plan can fail if say the target vehicles have moved and additional guns are brought in but the entire process will be a few minutes.
Getting the plan would be done with disposable scouts, these are mid altitude drones with a good laser link to the mother. They upload images of the target area before the shots to shoot them down hit.
Ultimately you are not going to beat this with conventional forces with more air defense. You need a rapidly relocatable force to counter drone swarms that is cheap. Meaning a defense in depth with your own drones.
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site.
Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected.
Most of these pieces already exist—modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time.
I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they’re lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible.
A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down.
This is mostly proven technology—it’s basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.
The mother drone produces the tactical plan and gives the plan to every drone in the swarm. It doesn’t need to have los to execute it although there would be a lack of flexibility during the attack.
The tactical plan would consist of things like waypoints, references images for positioning, and targets. Each drone for that hypothetical “70 vs 3 tanks” engagement has a track to follow, a period of exploiting the terrain, a maximum speed final approach, a specific place on a specific tank to target etc.
The plan can fail if say the target vehicles have moved and additional guns are brought in but the entire process will be a few minutes.
Getting the plan would be done with disposable scouts, these are mid altitude drones with a good laser link to the mother. They upload images of the target area before the shots to shoot them down hit.
Ultimately you are not going to beat this with conventional forces with more air defense. You need a rapidly relocatable force to counter drone swarms that is cheap. Meaning a defense in depth with your own drones.
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site.
Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected.
Most of these pieces already exist—modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time.
I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they’re lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible.
A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down.
This is mostly proven technology—it’s basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.